


it's not a onesie

by hgsslyra



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), technically civil war but idk if i should put it in that tag
Genre: at leats not in the tags that show up here, but the mcu ones arent called the watts ones lmao, i find it really funny that both thr webb and raimi films are tagged under the directors names
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-03 20:16:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20458835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hgsslyra/pseuds/hgsslyra
Summary: things peter parker has: random computer parts, spider-themed super powers, and old clothes. things peter parker doesn't have: a superhero suit, and no idea how to design one.





	it's not a onesie

The paper stares at him almost mockingly. Peter narrows his concentration at it, with a little bit of resentment. 

“If you’re so smug, why don’t you draw on yourself,” he mutters, to the paper and no one, and chews on the end of his pencil. His palm stops his chin from falling to the desk, and he feels his brows knit more.

How do fashion designers do this? Hell, how do any superheroes do this? The actual, real deal ones? There has to be someone with crazy good networking skills working for one of them who’s good at this stuff, and Peter wishes he could get a hold of their business card. He had been so excited, too-- he’d been unable to make conversation with May over their lunch after school. Her voice still rings in his ears, equally as dulled out by the sound of the then-raging thoughts of how cool making an actual superhero suit would be! Design it, choose the colors, make the cool gadgets, the whole thing! It seemed so simple and so exciting an hour ago, when he hastily excused himself the moment he walked through the apartment door, only to come crashing into a disappointing pit, and a mocking piece of paper. It’s paper, and somehow it’s mocking him and his sudden lack of knowledge about any color in existence.

Guess things are always easier in theory than in practice.

Peter huffs into his hand, using his opposite one to flip to the previous page. He huffs again for good measure, running his eyes over the schematics for the robotic elements of the costume. There isn’t much, because, hey, when you’re working on a very tight budget you gotta keep things attainable. Not to mention, his specific line of work involves a lot of flipping around this way and that, and carrying around big battery packs or chunky electronics woudl be an invitation for bad luck and some really unfortunate YouTube videos. Still, it’s progress, a nice reminder that just because he hasn’t come up with the actual aesthetics of the thing doesn’t mean he’s still on square one, hours after running to his room to start his wannabe designer career, and that he can at least pick up where he left off in the blueprints department. 

“This is the universe telling me I should stick to science stuff and not go into the fashion business,” he scoffs, petting his old marks on the paper with the lead of his pencil. The webshooters are already done, although they’re essentially always a work in progress. They’re always serviceable enough to not lead him to his doom mid-swing, of course, but with something like this he can’t just be satisfied with the first prototype and call it a day. It works for now, sure, but if there’s anything more exciting than a finished product is noticing way to make it better. It’s like the coolest puzzle ever-- the coolest superhero puzzle ever, the second part of which are the lenses, a little ways lower on the lined notebook page.

Shitty circumstances aside---really shitty circumstances aside--- having powers is the coolest thing to ever happen to local-loser-with-one-single-friend Peter Parker. The constant reminder of the things he can do now courses through his veins, always a constant reminder of the fact he can break door knobs now-- he can break door knobs! He couldn’t even open a jam jar the day before getting bit! There are positives to everything, one way or another, and the knowledge that he can do something now, something with impact, something that matters-- it’s so, so cool. 

That being said, it isn’t like he’s without pet peeves. Sure, the whole ordeal gave him a lot, but at some point it becomes too much. The first day with powers had been an experience, to say the least, because what was previous background noise in the every day life of his New York routine is nails on chalkboard now. Everything is so loud, so bright, so-- everything! So much! Even now, turning towards his door, where May’s room is somewhere on the other side of the wall (no x-ray vision-- he’s checked) and being able to hear her sleep is a little hard to get used to. Somebody stepped on the volume of his life, on the brightness and contrast of his computer screen, and it’s a headache. A real, real headache-- especially when fighting crime. He knows about the dangers of viral YouTube videos now, after the cautionary tale of Don’t Fight Bank Robbers On Really Bright And Really Hot Days, Did You Know Sensory Overload Is A Bitch?, which is probably still on the trending page. He stopped checking after the third consecutive week.

Ergo, lenses. He laughs a little to himself, recalling the fact that he’d gotten the idea in the first place when May had asked him if he could fiddle with her glasses to make them fit her face better. Replacement frames are crazy expensive, and while Peter had ultimately been too afraid to mess them up (May is really finicky with her fashion sense where possible, and Peter doesn’t want to ruin her Look, god forbid he stops being her favorite nephew), it has been a great catalyst to cook up a solution for his Everything Is So Bright I Became A Meme issue. But while he has the concept of it in his head and rough layouts on his notebook, he doesn’t have unlimited resources-- or even specific resources. It’s a stroke of luck whether he finds anything good in the dump outside the apartment complex (not literally in the dump, people usually leave their old electronics that they’ve given up on near them. On that note, wait, shouldn’t he pay to fix everyone’s stuff? Half of those computers are perfectly salvageable, they just don’t know it before they rush to throw them out, that could help with the bills--), and no one typically owns Superhero Glasses. He doesn’t live next door to Tony Stark, much as he may wish, because how cool would that be? 

Peter shakes his head, dropping his pencil to stretch before going to scavenge through the spare parts corner of his room. His desk is a bit of a mess, but it’s an organized mess! To him, anyway. Bigger parts closer to the wall, smaller parts near the actual working computer, Game Boys he’s been meaning to tinker with (things came up), which are next to banged up DVD players, a VHS player-- players, basically, and a whole bunch of decidedly Not Glasses like materials. 

“There’s gotta be something round in here somewhere,” he muses, picking up old radios to make way for his searching gaze, out on a mission. It scours mountains of wires and old keyboards, fingers running over the depths he can’t see to pick out something without eight corners. Peter squints, fishing out old batteries, pushing away textbooks he uses, like, every other week. 

“Nope,” he mumbles as he puts down the audio jack adaptor as quickly as he picked it up. 

“Double nope,” he says equally as flippantly at a broken antenna.

“Triple nope.” A toolbox, blue lid and beige base. “Wait, that’s where you were?”

Shaking his head, and making sure to place the toolbox in the cleaner side of the desk, he leans on the back of his chair, eyes set in an analyzing frown. He’s going for the chin scratch to top it off, until he realizes the plastic shifting isn’t some noise from the trash collectors outside-- it isn’t even outside, actually. It’s in his fidgeting hand, in the form of the old iDog he found a few months ago. It’d been a package deal with one of the radios littering his work space, and he maybe doesn’t need it for parts, and it was a very easy fix, but he isn’t heartless, and only the heartless would leave an abandoned iDog in the trash.

He switches on Fido (he isn’t desperate enough for a name for the iDog to name him iDoggie. Barely.) and smiles at the rainbow lights that flash over his face, like a weird club cyclopes that has several eyes instead of one. Which doesn’t make sense as a comparison. Its ears wave hello as Peter places him back to his usual guarding spot, on top of the old computer he fixed up a while ago. The little plastic thing wiggles its head from side to side, its whirring amplified against the material of the old hunk of a machine. Peter smiles again, with a self-satisfied nod (who even threw him out in the first place?), watching the toy shake its transparent tail, narrowing his eyes at the blurry image of something behind said transparent tail. Round, that’s something round! Reaching around the monitor, he grabs hold of it-- of a cylinder, thick and heavy enough to be noticeable, a dial at its side, something concave at the front that almost pricks the pad of his finger. He turns it in his hand, and Frido helpfully points at another similar piece. That makes two trash salvaged camera lenses, and a jolt of ‘oh, right, this old thing!’

The memory of all his old, non-reusable film cameras tickles in the back of his mind something funny and nostalgic. He’d never had a real-deal camera, the kind with all the cool lenses and all sorts of nifty settings, up until he got his hands on a phone and its internal Very Capable camera. And that’s great-- it works great, with its simplicity, straightforwardness and convenince, it does, but cameras, actual cameras are also pretty neat, Peter thinks. All machines are inherently interesting if you look hard enough (Fido is crazy simple, but Peter still likes him, and it doesn’t make the thought of what in the world could go into an Iron Man gauntlet any less neat), but taking pictures is fun! People come and go a lot, and the dull ache of it lingers for as long as he lets it, but memories stay, and memories can be pictures. Snapshots of old fishing trips with Ben and May are hung up on the fridge, all awkward angles and big smiles. Peter couldn’t stay still for five seconds back then-- he’d ended up chasing butterflies or anything that moves, and then turned to his disposable camera to use said butterfly as a muse, and then his very conveniently placed family members. Finding any amount of lenses was cool in his book, even if one was, and still is, very beat up. Someone probably dropped it-- the glass is cracked and unusable, the frame is coming apart at the seams as he holds it, except machines don’t have seams.

Peter pries apart the frame at the front, and carefully separates the crumbling glass mess. Disappointment sours something in him for a moment, for as long as he remembers his original plan to try to make a Real Deal Camera. Another cool puzzle, at less than half the price of an actual camera! At no price, actually, and just enough to satiate his curiosity. The tricky part to find about these things are the actual lenses. Y’know, the broken bits he’s currently trying to avoid cuts from. 

“Property of Butterfingers,” he comments, leaving the pieces in another of his available areas in his desk. “Either that or someone was in an awful mood.”

But, hey! Round, it’s round! Shaking his head, Peter pats the iDog’s now still head in passing as he sits down, two empty lenses in hand. His fingers habitually run over the bumpy surface of the dial, now a bit more intentionally. As the disk spins, the barrel of the lens grows-- focusing, probably. The shutters at the front of one are half in and half out, and Peter wiggled the flaps around as they make little clicky noises. Not the kind of clicky that happens when you snap a picture, but the kind of old, worn material, stuck somewhere in the inner workings of the tube, shingling like his kind of bells. It’s loose, that’s for sure, especially now that the lens is out and very much unusable. Tilts his head, turns it over, wiggles it a bit, and receives more of the little bell chimes. Shutter chimes? This would make for a weird wind chime. What woudl it even do? The loose flaps are so small, and while Peter can’t exactly tell how loud it is to not-radiactive-bitten ears, he can hazard a guess and say it would be a pretty muted sound. Cool looking at least, but not really functional. He tilts his head the opposite way, blinks, and turns the lense. Could also be a salt shaker, if he got it to open and close properly. He laughs at the clunky table decor in front of his mind’s eye, turning to let out a cascade of pepper on a poor, none-the-wiser breakfast. Shakers work because they have small orifices, and this just opens like a hatch, like a half closed eye. Like a Bond movie opening.

Like… a squinting eye. And he has two eyes, and he has two lenses. 

“Oh, that’s an even cooler way to use these! Man, no one would’a guess their busted camera equipment would go to a superhero suit!”

It’d need a filter, and other modifications, of course, barring aesthetics. A way to recognize his eye movements, so Peter doesn’t need to manually change the squint, which would kill the vibe mid-fight. Would also almost certainly get him punched. No time to do the anime glass glinting thing, so… a sensor? There’s space in these for wiring, and he definitely has wire in his dragon horde (May calls it that, and he doesn’t hoard, but damn it sounds cool)

He’s going to need thicker frames, though. One of the lenses is already without its original one, and the other is well on its way to retirement. Thicker rims, something round, used for sight, fishing trips-- binoculars? Those aren’t hard to find, in the trash or in little pop up shops near zoo’s. 

“Zoo isn’t too far from school,” he begins, flipping to the next page in his notebook to jot down three o’clock, “Could tell May it’s another trip.”

Ironic, given the last one was what led him down the rabbithole to using lenses and binoculars to fight crime and that is so cool and his legs are both bouncing and his fingers keep going back and forth on the dials.

It’s coming together, he’s getting somewhere that isn’t just the webshooters! Maybe they might look a little weird but you need a prototype before you can get to a better result. Trial and error! Spider-man is all about trial and error, it sometimes feels like. No handy textbook to learn how to be a vigilante.

“I should write one. Once I get the hang of this.”

He tilts his head again, flipping pages in the quiet of his room, stopping on one of the several off limits sections of his notebook (he’d lied and said it was a diary entry to May, which while embarrassing, is better than ‘hey, May, guess what kind of chemical reaction is going on in my blood?’) and a catalyst to this design frenzy.

One of the only things he got down on the first try, the emblem. Not all superheroes necessarily have an emblem-- in fact, staring down at the piece of paper he’d accidentally folded into itself in his excitement at the time of closing the notebook, Peter realizes that, hey, isn’t the only Avenger with a logo Captain America? An explicit logo, not just some symbol that eventually just… became their logo. No designer’s intent. Black Widow is known for black suits and ever-changing hair, not an emblem printed out on her suit. If anything, her appeal is the lack thereof. Maybe the fact that Cap is the only one who both has an emblem and who is, technically, super old should worry him a bit but he has to commit. It was a spider who bit him, and he’s not going to stop doubling down on that motif at the whole webbing thing. There’s a theme going on here, and possibly old-fashioned or not- he likes Cap’s symbol. It looks cool! And you can’t change his mind, nor kill his excitement for having a superhero emblem. Sure, it’s a really simple spider, but it’s… something. It’s cohesive, and, again, really cool. His chair squeaks as gives it a spin, grabbing his pencil again as he digs his foot into the floor in time to stop face to face with a dirty, ragged black hoodie.

He shouldn’t be surprised that the first few times he’s gone out to fight crime people have been scared of him. Desperate times had called for desperate measures but, really? A black hoodie? Only time knows what the stains on it are, Peter definitely doesn’t remember where they came from, but he can guess a lot of messy dinners and just regular wear and tear. It’d looked better before he’d gone and scuffed it up in dark alleyways fighting criminals but, y’know, sacrifices have to be made. Although that doesn’t explain why he thought he would look like anything better than a second mugger wearing a gray scarf around his face. He’s been careful to only really be out at night, where crime already likes to fester, but he couldn’t go risking his face getting recognized, cover of night or no. The pencil lifts from its tapping position on his chin towards the hoodie, from the tear in the hood to the scratches at the bottom. Queens criminals aren’t the nicest welcome comitee.

“This-- was a terrible color choice, even I know that,” he shakes his head, casting a glance towards the gloveless black gloves, which didn’t help the look. At all. “Takes the whole creepy crawlie thing way too seriously.”

The pencil returns to the desk, and Peter opens his closet, looking through the abandoned bunches of clothes. It’s hard not to see, once it starts to peek out amongst the subdued maroons and marines. Bright red is made to grab your attention. He pulls out a hood first, and gives the jawstrings that follow suit a good enough yank to untangle them form the fabric monster.

Peter tilts his head, scouring the threads of the material as if it would have a date printed on them, somewhere. No date, but a memory, a misty one, another May one. She’s in a lot of them, just like this one of winter. He knows it’s winter, just not the year. Couldn’t have been too long ago. The plastic rustling of shopping bags gave May’s intentions away as she entered the door, and groceries had come to his mind, but he wouldn’t call buying a hoodie a grocery. It’d been on sale, and while, yeah, not a grocery, May had insisted he’d look good in it, would be comfy in it, and while she’d been right, and Peter had believed her, it didn’t last for longer than a school day.

He’s always liked red, would say it’s his favorite color interchangeably with blue. It’s just-- a cool color! Ironic, since it’s actually not ‘cool’ in the literal sense, and the fact that it isn’t literally cool is what makes it not-literally cool. Being literally cool is blue’s job. Red is bold and in your face, red was here to say a few things, red is strong-- you can’t ignore red. It’s the first thing your eyes see in a crowd, it’s the light at the end of a tunnel, it’s the sky between the trees (or the fire, but fire would burn down the forest where those trees are), it’s the color on Iron Man’s armor, it still was the color on Iron Man’s armor that day at the Stark Expo, red was the color of the best day of his life at said Star Expo, life- threatening danger aside. He’d been too little to comprehend the severity of the situation, and a part of him says he maybe still doesn’t get it, and that maybe he shouldn’t look back so fondly to the time a robot almost shot at him, but Iron Man saved him! Iron Man showed up, and Iron Man told him he did a good job. He did a good job. His chest lights up red, and the red spreads to the tips of his fingers and his bouncing legs. He can’t remember wearing anything bright red since he was a Stark-Expo age; his clothes would imply he hates red and bright colored things and loves duller colors. It isn’t that he dislikes bright colors-- he loves them, and he has several little bright-colored things. Pencils, pens--- small, inconspicuous things. Things that wouldn’t make him draw more unnecessary, uncomfortable attention than needed. Red is strong and red is bold, and Peter Parker isn’t strong and isn’t bold, but Spider-man can be. 

He grins. And while he’s brightening his reds, why not have his blues follow suit? 

“I’m on to something, I’m on to something--!”

Peter runs after the visions on his head, pencil in hand once again and actual colors going through his head, for once. Somebody dropped food coloring in there, or mixed up the reds with the whites, because there’s color in there now, and he can place it and name it and knows it’s red and blue, black goggles, and a spider emblem somewhere in there. He draws a line down the shoulders of the messy hoodie-shaped doodle on his paper, scribbles out the sleeves while he’s at it. He knows he has a bright blue sweater somewhere, and while a part of him is asking why in his right mind would he wear both a sleeveless hoodie and a sweater in this climate-- well, the cool factor is worth it! His opposite hand shoots out in front of him, searching for the clanging of what he knows is a nearby pencil tin. One of the little inconspicuous red pencils is there, and it jumps to messily cover the surface of the hoodie. A light blue highlighter follows, and it lights up the sleeves of the crude drawing something outrageous, and Peter fidgets with the outline of his seat, tapping an exciting rhythm as he starts on the second iteration. The gloves are up in the air-- and the shoes, what about the shoes? 

He can print the logo on the hoodie. He would have to DIY it himself because he can’t pull off a lie like ‘that guy who beats up bad guys stole my art project hoodie’, but it shouldn’t be impossible. Maybe he can draw it with Sharpie? Would take a looooot of ink and retracing and redrawing but he wants the spider motif, and he wants the emblem, and he wants to feel this excited every time he puts on this combination of red and blue sweats, because he can put his own logo on a bright ass red jacket with torn up sleeves and be excited about it, and not worry about it, and feel like it’s right and not obscenely out of place, because Spider-man can play football where Peter Parker can’t, and he can wear traffic light red where Peter Parker could never.

**Author's Note:**

> words cant Describe how all over the place and messy this thing is but ive been wanting to write spidey fic for the looooongest time and a first attempt is better than no attempt. i've always loved the homemade suit bc it's just so charming to imagine peter made it with the intention to make it look like his own cool superhero costume (it kinda looks like he cut off the sleeves which implies he just really wanted to add blue hnbgfd) and then i remembered he mostly wears not super saturated colors? and how the point of hoco was in part to merge the peter parker and spiderman identities? and i wondered how that split would happen in the first place? also love the dumpster diving bit. also he has an idog?? in civil war?? on top of his computer?? like i said all over the place
> 
> the last line is a ref to peters 'what's you mo' answer in civil war i feel its been long enough since it came out that i have to refresh minds


End file.
